Mistakes Bloggers Make – 10 Blogging Tips for Beginners

As a blogger, sharing blogging tips for beginners to benefit from is paying it forward! Without those tips from other bloggers and the training I did starting out, my blog would not be where it is right now! Tackling the topic of mistakes bloggers make is something I decided to do because well…I made them myself!

Blogging comes with a LOT of mistakes, especially in the first year! I have made my share of them!! I spent the first 2 months of blogging doing essentially everything wrong! I look back at some blog posts and think “who wrote this???”

While I say these are blogging tips for beginners, they can apply to veteran bloggers as well!

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Starting My Own Blog

I started my blog back in November of 2106 and blogged for about six months. I did everything wrong!

My writing was “ok” but I had no idea how to format posts, how to make them SEO friendly, and definitely no idea how to promote my posts so that people knew where to find me! I was clearly making ALL the mistakes bloggers make in the early phases!

After taking a year off from blogging due to relocating, I decided to come back and do things right!!

I immediately began taking courses (lots of them) and re-read books I read a year ago! I listened to every blogger willing to offer blogging tips! And I can tell you, I got more pageviews in my first full month back at blogging than I did at any point in time during the first six months previously!

Offering blogging tips for beginners is more than just telling them what they should be doing or what DID work for us! It is also about sharing the mistakes bloggers make along the way so hopefully, they can avoid them!

So, in no particular order,  I am going to share with you some of the mistakes I made in promoting my blog that kept me from getting more traffic.

 

 

Blogging Tips for Beginners – Top 10 Mistakes Bloggers Make

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #1 – Not Learning SEO 

Any and all blogging tips for beginners and any discussion on mistakes bloggers make should include SEO because this is one area many bloggers neglect!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  The short description is it basically determines if and where your site will rank in searches.  If you have poor SEO (or non-existent) your site will not be found in search results if someone is searching for a particular word or phrase.  In this post, I am not going to get into how you optimize your SEO but I suggest you find some great tutorials on it!!  Here are some of my favorites

GET YOUR BLOG ON (FREE)

 

GIRL BOSSES ROCK MEMBERSHIP PLAN  – This program totally changed my blog!

 

KINGDOM BLOGGERS BOOTCAMP –  This is a gamechanger for ANY faith blogger! I would say it is a must have if you really want your blog to grow! 

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #2 – Not Learning How to Use Pinterest for Business

Pinterest is the source of the bulk of my traffic. I do get quite a bit from other social media sources and also search engines but Pinterest is by far the #1 source.

If you are not actively promoting your posts on Pinterest, you are missing out on a lot of traffic!!

Your blog is your business! Your Pinterest account should not be a personal account. If it is, you are not taking advantage of all it has to offer. I suggest a business account AND using Rich Pins.  Here is how you can create Rich Pins on Pinterest

If you are not sure how to use Pinterest to market your blog, here are some links to great courses on it

The Profitable Pinner

 

Pinterest for Bloggers and Business 

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #3 – Not Using Vertical Pins or Text on Pins

Ok maybe you already have your account set up and you are using Pinterest but you are not getting traffic and people aren’t re-pinning your content.

One mistake I made was not using Pinterest optimized or vertical pins!

Now, I will RARELY re-pin something that is not vertical. The only way I will is if it is absolutely something I need, so I save it so that I have the link. And many times if that is the case I will save it to a private board.

If I am sharing another blogger’s content, I will not do it if it is not vertical, because most group boards have rules against it. Make your pins vertical if you want them to be shared!  Canva has some great templates to create Pinterest ready images!

 

The second issue is pinning a pin with a nice Bible verse on it or a pretty image. While some people may love these and may save them to a board, they will not know it leads to a blog post so they will not click on your link.

You want traffic to your blog! So let them know that it is a blog post by putting a title on it and a good, keyword description in the description text. Do NOT USE the alt-text function for your description (see more on this below!).

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #4 – Not Using Pinterest Group Boards

Mistake #3 mentioned group boards. Group boards are essentially a group of people sharing content about a specific niche. These boards allow members to post their own content and then typically ask they re-pin 1 or 2 pins for each pin they share. It is a great way to have others reciprocate and share your content as long as you are being considerate and sharing others’ as well.

If you are a Christian or Messianic blogger, you are welcome to visit my group board and follow the steps in the description to be added! Like most, my board does have rules so please read those before asking to join!

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #5 – Not Providing An Easy Way For People To Share Your Content

Ok, this one is now my biggest pet peeve and one of the blogging tips for beginners I think is most valuable because all the other tips on Pinterest, etc., hinge on this one.

I want to share someone’s blog post. I read their post and I start looking for a way to share…and nothing! There are no pinnable images, there are no Facebook share buttons, there are no Click to Tweet links….nothing!

I was there myself!

You want people to share your content!

Bloggers have very little time and often read quite a few posts during their day. They don’t have the added time it takes to hunt down a way to share on each post!

Utilize the Click to Tweet plugin if you use Word Press.

It is a great way to get people to tweet portions of your post!

IMPORTANT – It does not matter if YOU use these social media apps or not! Your readers may! You do not have to have a Twitter account for someone else to share your post on Twitter, so give them a way to do that!

Use Shareaholic or Social Warfare to place social media buttons on your post. Be sure to not just use buttons for the social sites you are on, again, consider the ones the person sharing might be on!

Place a vertical pinnable image in your post somewhere and use a plugin like Pin It (Shareaholic has a feature to do this) so people can just hover over it and pin the image!

People WANT to help share your content!  Just don’t make it difficult for them to do!

 

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #6 – Not Entering Pin Descriptions

Whether you use a pin in your blog post or whether you are adding pins directly in Pinterest ( I suggest pinning from your site because Pinterest prefers it), a description is so important.

Place a brief keyword rich description in there along with some hashtags and you are good to go!  Tasty Pins is a great way to do this! In discussing blogging tips for beginners, one thing that should be mentioned is using the Alt Text field to enter your pin description! It is not meant for that purpose!

The Alt Text field is actually meant to describe the image to visually impaired people! If you load this down with a Pinterest description and a bunch of hashtags, it will not only not make sense to them but it will likely annoy them!

You need to enter a Pinterest description in the proper place. You can do this with Tasty Pins or enter the code into the image source directly. You can do this by adding:

data-pin-description=”Your Pinterest description here” within the img src code.

If you use Rich Pins it will give a snippet from your post but you still want to add a description as well!

 

 

 

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #7 – Not Sharing Others’ Content

No post on blogging tips for beginners would be complete without mentioning sharing!

The blogging community is a sharing community and so is Pinterest!! Pinterest loves re-pinning so be sure you are not just pinning your own content!

The more you re-pin, and the more variety you re-pin, the more engagement you will have! Don’t just re-pin within your niche either! Think of all the hobbies you have and re-pin those pins! Do you love home decor? Find pins in the styles you love and re-pin those!

But make sure you are pinning to relevant boards. Don’t just have “catch all” boards. If you pin fashion, have a fashion board. If you pin makeup ideas, have a beauty board, etc.

Also, share in other ways! Re-tweet another blogger’s tweets! Share a blog post on Facebook! If you want people to share your content and know who you are, sharing theirs is a great way to achieve that!

The blogging community is supportive so make sure you support them in return!

  

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #8 – Not Utilizing Tailwind

One pin and you’re done does not work for driving traffic to your blog. You need to keep your pins cycling on Pinterest and the best way to do that is automate it.

Tailwind is the program I use to automate and schedule my pins! It keeps my older content out there so old posts don’t die a slow death online! You cannot spend your entire day manually re-pinning your older content (and newer). You want multiple pins for one blog post! So automate it to post to your group boards on a regular basis and you can set it and forget it!

If you want to learn how to do that there is some great training on it!

Tailwind also recently rolled out their Smart Loop feature, which allows you to have your content cycled through your boards consistently and without spamming!

If you sign up for Tailwind you can get your first 100 pins for free!

I recently suffered a stroke that had me in the hospital for a week and then at home recovering. Thanks to Tailwind, my pins kept on getting pinned in Pinterest even when I could not do a thing. It kept my traffic coming and had my Pinterest account basically on auto-pilot. My traffic barely felt a thing thanks to Tailwind.

 

 

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make #9 – Not Using Tailwind Tribes

If you are already using Tailwind but are not using Tribes you are missing out on traffic. Tailwind Tribes are communities of a specific niche that function sort of like group boards and re-pin each other’s content. There are also great chat functions within a tribe where you can ask questions, etc.
A good tribe can really boost your traffic.

 

Mistakes Bloggers Make – #10 – Overloading a Blog Post With Images and Pop-Ups

I am all about a blog post having images…mine do! But If I go to a post and it is nothing but images to scroll past to get to the post itself, I may not stay!

In addition, it slows your site down. 2-3 images on a post is more than enough. People will check out if they have to click more than 2 or 3 times to see something or if they have to scroll more than 2-3 seconds to see the rest of your post.

Pop-ups are another issue. One or two pop-ups is fine! Having them on every page is going to make me leave your blog.

 

One Last Thing!

Read everything you can!!

One book for Christian bloggers that I highly recommend is By His Grace We Blog by Carmen Brown of Married By His Grace.

This book gives you the benefit of Carmen’s experience as a blogger and will help you avoid the many pitfalls I fell into!! I wish I had read this book earlier on in my blogging journey!!

You can read more about Carmen and her book HERE on the guest post she did for my blog!

I cannot recommend it enough!

  

Some other posts like ‘Mistakes Bloggers Make’ you might enjoy:

HOW DO I KNOW IF GOD IS CALLING ME TO BLOG? – WHEN THE WELL RUNS DRY

THE NEW CHRISTIAN BLOGGER – FEELING LIKE A LITTLE FISH IN A BIG POND

BLOGGING FOR BEGINNERS – WHY YOUR PINS ARE NOT BEING SHARED IN TAILWIND TRIBES

CHRISTIAN BLOGGERS WANTED! – 3 BENEFITS OF STARTING CHRISTIAN LIFESTYLE BLOGS

CREATING PRODUCTS AS A BLOGGER